Responding to the Threat of Violent Extremism by Paul Thomas

Author:Paul Thomas [Thomas, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849665254
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2012-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

Whilst addressing discussions around surveillance and political interference, this crime prevention formulation is highly problematic for two reasons. First, assuming the ‘crime’ to be prevented is terrorist activity, why has Prevent activity worked with such large numbers of Muslim young people, yet focused so little on political, social and individual/psychological factors likely to make at least some young Muslims at risk of being involved in violent extremism? The evaluation evidence available suggests that engagement with such issues has been studiously avoided in practice for a number of reasons, leaving much Prevent activity via local authorities and community groups as bland and generalised youth activities for Muslims only.19 Crime prevention youth activities, such as Youth Inclusion Projects managed by local YOTs, have worked with smaller numbers of carefully targeted young people, often referred by relevant agencies. The ‘Channel’ programme, which is discussed more fully in Chapter 6, would seem to fit the ‘crime prevention’ understanding reasonably well, but the broader Prevent activity to date simply doesn’t fit any meaningful understanding of that concept. Second, it avoids discussion of how the monocultural approach of Prevent discussed above may actually be reinforcing the likelihood of some young Muslims being attracted to violent extremism. The community cohesion analysis of ethnic relations in Britain discussed in Chapter 2 was precisely that ‘parallel lives’ had encouraged tensions between communities, and separate, oppositional identities. This reality has been confirmed by more recent research among young people in Oldham and Rochdale, Greater Manchester, with significant numbers of white and Muslim young men having prejudiced and antagonistic attitudes towards ‘others’.20 Denham focused on how building resilience against extremism among Muslim communities was a key aim of this ‘crime prevention’ Prevent policy, but arguably you cannot build resilience against intolerance, racism and hatred of other ways of life without individuals and their communities having the confidence, skills and links, the ‘bridging social capital’,21 or cross-community links, that comes from meaningful and ongoing cross-ethnic contact. Indeed, Denham himself said, as the responsible Home Office minister, in the government’s response to the 2001 urban disturbances that the areas of the country not experiencing racial tensions were those who had ‘succeeded in uniting diverse groups through a shared sense of belonging to, and pride in, a common civic identity’.22 The government’s consistent defence of why a Prevent policy separate to community cohesion, and focused solely on Muslim communities, is important and needed is that terrorists can emerge from cohesive communities, with the ACPO supporting this because of ‘the fact that the four suicide bombers in 2005 were nurtured in cohesive communities’.23 However, as Chapter 1 discussed in more detail, this is simply not true – three of the bombers grew up in the highly ethnically segregated and racially tense Leeds suburb of Beeston, an area which fits the theory of ‘parallel lives’. From that perspective, attractions to violent extremism, whether radical Islamist or racist white extremism, are likely to be stronger in culturally, if not physically, isolated and monocultural communities where ethnic segregation

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